Françoise Arnoul

Biography: life and films

In a career that spans over sixty years, Françoise Arnoul has appeared in over ninety roles on film and television, although her period of stardom in the 1950s was tragically brief. Her birth name is Françoise Annette Marie Mathilde Gautsch and she was born on 3rd June 1931 in the Algerian city of Constantine. The daughter of a military man and actress, she has two brothers and spent her childhood in Algeria, taking dancing lessons from the age of seven. After the Second World War, she settled in France and took drama lessons under Andrée Bauer-Thérond. She made her screen debut at the age of 18 in Willy Rozier's L'Épave (1949), in the role that made her an overnight star. (Prior to this, she had had an uncredited walk-on part in Jacques Becker's Rendez-vous de juillet). She then appeared in Jean Boyer's musical comedy Nous irons à Paris (1950).

Throughout the 1950s, Françoise Arnoul was highly sought after and would often be cast as the destructive temptress, most notably in Henri Verneuil's Le Fruit défendu (1952) where she starred opposite the iconic performer Fernandel. Verneuil worked with Arnoul again on the comedy Le Mouton à cinq pattes (1954) and bleak melodrama Des gens sans importance (1956). In the latter film, Arnoul was paired with an actor, Jean Gabin, who was to become one of her closest friends. The year before, she and Gabin had worked together successfully on Jean Renoir's French Cancan (1954), in which Arnoul gave one of her most memorable performances. In Marcel Carné's colourful musical Le Pays, d'où je viens (1956), Arnoul notched up another box office hit, before finding her way into Roger Vadim's sizzlingly sensual world in Sait-on jamais? (1957). Henri Decoin then gave her one of her most famous roles, as the seductive spy Cora in La Chatte (1958) and its sequel La Chatte sort ses griffes (1960).

In the 1960s, Arnoul's presence in cinema was less noticeable, as the actress spent more of her time supporting political causes with her second husband, the filmmaker Bernard Paul (whom she met during the making of Costa-Gavras' Compartiment tueurs in 1964). She showed her support for abortion by adding her name to the famous 'Manifesto of the 343 sluts', declaring that she herself had had an abortion (a criminal offence in France at the time). For the rest of her career, Arnoul would be relegated to supporting roles, in such diverse films as Jacques Rouffio's Violette & François (1977) and Brigitte Roüan's Post coïtum animal triste (1997). More recently, she has been seen mainly on television, in TV films that include Duval: Un mort de trop (2001) and Le Voyageur de la Toussaint (2007).

Filmography